


Baltimore 2014

by zacharybosch



Series: Bootblacking [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Bootblacking, But whatever, Collars, Dom/sub Undertones, Gloves, Leather Kink, M/M, Post-Episode: s02e10 Naka-Choko, and a big ol helping of PAINFUL FEELINGS, slightly more over than under
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-18 00:18:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9353369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zacharybosch/pseuds/zacharybosch
Summary: Parking at the far end of the street was one last ditch attempt to forestall the inevitable. The long walk to Hannibal’s front door might give Will a chance to come to his senses, he’d told himself, knowing full well it would do nothing of the sort. The only thing the dark night and biting wind did was make him hurry, fingers coiled against the cold in leather gloves as the bag and its contents thumped rhythmically against his thigh.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i promised a sequel, and here it is. lighter on the bootblacking this time, but heavier on the angst. you're welcome.
> 
> i'd like to extend endless gratitude and thanks to [hannibatchsmuse](http://hannibatchsmuse.tumblr.com/) for sharing their knowledge and expertise, without which this fic would not have happened

_are you busy tonight?_

_Not with anything urgent. Why?_

_good_

It was too late really to be driving out to Baltimore, and a forecast of heavy snow made any long journeys inadvisable. Will was in the habit of doing inadvisable things lately.

Skidding along the I-95, he thought back over the events that led him to this point. After Randall Tier’s death and the first bootblacking incident, their time spent together had increased. Dinner at Hannibal’s house several nights a week, and always after his Wednesday evening appointment. Rough touches, sometimes, in front of the fire with brandy, or in the car on an excursion for the Bureau. An aching desire to be tender, overridden by harsher need to consume Hannibal while he still could.

Because Will would have to give Hannibal up. He knew this, and a large part of him wanted it, but his traitorous heart remained beating all the while. Freddie was dealt with, and they eye-fucked over the dinner that was made of her, and the next time Will went to Hannibal’s house there was a new addition to his marble-floored entrance lobby.

Olive-green leather and light wood, perched on a small dais. A considerable sign of restraint on Hannibal’s part given his usual taste in interior decor. Passed off to other guests as a decorative antique, Will saw the bootblacking chair sitting innocently against the wall and felt his heart hammer in his chest.

After that, Will had got it into his head that a line absolutely had to be drawn. Plausible deniability up until now, but the chair was a physical manifestation of activities he could barely admit to himself that he’d been partaking of. The only way to make sure nothing untoward ever happened again was to remove temptation completely: throw out his boots, along with all his other leather things that had been languishing in a box in the spare bedroom.

It was difficult, though. The image of Hannibal’s fingers working boot laces through eyelets, the sound of his lips as he spat on the buffing cloth, trailed Will like cobwebs during the day. At night, they played bright and vivid in his mind. The fact that Hannibal had heavily implied that the bootblacking chair had been placed in his lobby for Will’s use didn’t help. At all.

So he decided he would haul out _all_ the old junk that was lying around his house. Save the leather box for last; by that point he would have thrown away so much useless crap he’d kept for vaguely sentimental reasons, that getting rid of one more box of feelings would be easy.

He’d forgotten he even still had the collar. A relic from a period in his life that felt like someone else’s, he’d used it only a handful of times and it was the same predictable story as always: he enjoyed it, loved it, and then shunned it fiercely. He had no idea where the leash had gone, but that didn’t matter; there was enough old rope lying around in the barn and Will knew his way around several sturdy knots. The rope would be rough and unforgiving, and Will’s hands trembled as he sat in his car at the end of Hannibal’s street. The collar was stuffed in a bag on the passenger seat. 

Will wondered how he ever managed to convince himself that he would actually throw it all away. Of course he would end up back here. Of course he would make it worse. He was playing right into Hannibal’s hand, and the worst thing of all was that it was entirely intentional. 

Parking at the far end of the street was one last ditch attempt to forestall the inevitable. The long walk to Hannibal’s front door might give Will a chance to come to his senses, he’d told himself, knowing full well it would do nothing of the sort. The only thing the dark night and biting wind did was make him hurry, fingers coiled against the cold in leather gloves as the bag and its contents thumped rhythmically against his thigh.

The red-framed front door loomed up all too soon. 

“Hello, Will. Please, come in.”

Will grunted in reply, shouldered his way inside and went straight for the chair. 

“I see. I must say, I’m surprised.”

“No you’re not. Shut up.”

“Rude tonight, Will.”

“You’ll deal with it.” Will held out the bag, thought better of it, then held it out again. “I have something for you.” 

Hannibal walked over and took the bag, eyes flooding with… something, as he opened the handles and drew out the collar. He held Will in hard eye contact.

“Looking to work out some issues?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“You assume I’m even interested in such activities.”

“Aren’t you?”

Will wasn’t as surprised as he might have been when Hannibal broke eye contact. He’d been doing it a lot lately. “I am.”

“Then put it on.”

***

It had become almost unbearably hot in the room. Will, still in his overcoat and gloves, felt the first slow slide of sweat down his spine as Hannibal finished massaging Huberd’s Shoe Grease into one boot and moved on to the other. He’d opted for bare hands over a cloth this time, and the push and slide of fingers over leather was hypnotic. Hannibal had been speaking for a few minutes, Will realised, but about what he had no idea. All he could hear was the clink of the rings on the collar, the faint creak of rope where it was coiled about his leather gloves, and Hannibal’s sharp intake of breath as Will suddenly yanked the rope tight and pulled him between his thighs.

“Why are you talking? You keep on talking. I don’t want to listen to you.”

Hannibal was taken aback, just a little. He hid it quickly, and well, but Will saw. “I was just--”

“No. Stop it. Be quiet.” Will shoved two gloved fingers into Hannibal’s mouth, thumb and ring finger gripping his jaw. “Now carry on.”

The angle was awkward, crushed up in between Will’s legs, but Hannibal resumed his task as best he could. Will was intimately familiar with the particular brand of grease currently spread dark and messy over Hannibal’s hands; it was plant-based, and body-safe. He’d get it on the floor later, on the arms of the chair, all over his beautiful cream-coloured shirt. And then some.

Will let his fingers move and curl, push in and out, drag over Hannibal’s lips. He smeared saliva over Hannibal’s chin, down his neck, onto the collar. Eventually, Hannibal’s silence was worse than the constant low cadence of his voice.

Will removed his hand completely and gripped the arm of the chair. He let the rope in his other hand fall slack. “You can speak again if you want.”

“You’re sweating.”

“It’s hot in here.”

“Allow me.” Hannibal moved to shed some of Will’s layers, starting with the leather gloves.

“No... Leave those on.”

“As you like.” Hannibal skimmed his fingers once over the soft leather, then began popping the buttons on Will’s overcoat. He moved silently, and betrayed nothing. Will let Hannibal move his body as he needed, each touch burning more painfully than the last and paying no mind to the spreading pattern of dark grease fingerprints. Hannibal trailed his hands over the placket of Will’s shirt, managed to slip two buttons from their holes and leave a fingerprint like a burning brand on his chest before Will grabbed his wrist in an iron grip and moved it firmly away.

Hannibal let the ghost of a smile play about his mouth, and bent back to Will’s boots.

***

“You wore those boots on purpose, didn’t you, Will? So I would use the Huberd’s. You wanted this to happen.”

Infuriating how calm and collected Hannibal could sound when on his elbows and knees on a hard marble floor, ass up and bare and presented. Uncomfortable as it was to admit, Will knew that he _had_ done it on purpose, and Hannibal had anticipated it. Intentional and inevitable.

“Maybe I did. But you had the tools ready and waiting. You wanted it too.” Will smeared more of the shoe grease over his gloved hands, continued kneading the meat of Hannibal’s thigh with one hand while the other moved to rub slick circles around his hole. “You want it.”

“Yes.” A hairline crack in composure.

“Say it like you mean it, Hannibal.”

“ _Yes._ ”

Will hated Hannibal in that moment. That he could so freely give himself over whenever he chose, that he could take what he wanted and revel in it, with little regard for consequence. What was consequence to a man such as Hannibal? He had a contingency plan in place for everyone; there was no doubt in Will’s mind that Hannibal had a quick knife and a clean exit ready for him if the need arose. He would regret it, for sure, but he would do it all the same.

He was free, in all the ways that Will was not, and the envy burned fierce in the pit of his stomach.

“You’re mine, tell me you’re mine.”

“I’m yours.”

“You want this and you’re _mine._ ”

“I want this and I’m yours, Will, I’m yours.”

Will pulled one glove off with his teeth, and fumbled at his zipper with shaking fingers. Hannibal wanted him, wanted to be taken and marked and owned, and Will wanted to give it to him. He wanted to fuck until he couldn’t feel, until the roaring in his head was smothered by chemical floods and firing neurons and anything, anything at all to make him forget who he was and what he was doing and the man he was doing it with.

As he took his cock in hand, Will found himself wishing that he was still sick, that the person he was right now was the product of a dissociative state and he’d have no memory of it in the morning. He certainly felt sick, sick from the knowledge that Hannibal was obsessed with him, that he _liked_ being the object of obsession even as it repulsed him. Sick from knowing that when Hannibal said he was Will’s, he meant it truthfully, and Will loved it.

If he fucked Hannibal now, there would be no shred of decency left within him. Not because he was lying with a murderer, taking pleasure in the company of one so morally corrupt; in the grand scheme of things, it meant little to him. What kept Will awake at night was knowing that he had Hannibal’s heart in the palm of his hand and he was slowly closing his fist to crush it.

The fact that he even felt bad about deceiving Hannibal in the first place told him all he needed to know about the state of his moral compass. Redemption was a light fading into the distance even as he ran toward it.

Will’s chest heaved as he held his cock against the cleft of Hannibal’s ass, great gasping breaths as he jerked himself roughly, gripping Hannibal’s hip hard enough to bruise. It would be so easy, a strong push and the long slow slide, engulfing heat and the ripple of muscle. Beneath him, Hannibal found himself wanting. He wouldn’t beg, wouldn’t say please, but he telegraphed it in the cant of his hips and the flex of his thighs. Will would deny him in this, just as he had denied him before and would deny him again.

Will finished with a groan, let fall from red-bitten lips quickly clamped shut. His spend was splattered on the small of Hannibal’s back, dripping down between his cheeks and catching in the soft dusting of hair. With gloved fingers --not skin on skin, if he touched Hannibal now he would never leave-- Will shoved in, wiped his cum to mark Hannibal inside, where no-one could see his shame.

This would be the last time, he knew.

Hannibal had spoken before of his memory palace. Will imagined it as a grand and terrible estate, housing buildings both foreboding and beautiful. Each moment of his life tucked away in some room or another, nothing forgotten, although some memories purposefully kept under lock and key. All preserved perfect in amber, ready to replay at whim.

Will’s mind was no such palace. The stream was a recent invention; before Hannibal, his mind had been a rickety old New Orleans shotgun house, the one they’d lived in the longest before his dad moved them out of state. Floorboards worn with age stretching out endlessly, strewn with polaroid photographs. Some captioned with a name, a place, a date. Others left blank, or scribbled over. Every picture crisp and sharp.

As he walked down the steps of Hannibal’s front porch and out into the night, he snapped a photo in his mind and let it flutter to the floor with the others.

_Baltimore 2014._

**Author's Note:**

> come yell at me on [tumblr](http://zacharybosch.tumblr.com)!


End file.
